If you have poor Shopify Meta descriptions and titles, like most stores, you may see organic Search visitors increase 30% by following this tutorial. I see good SEO tags regularly increase traffic almost overnight with our Shopify SEO clients.

Google alters search snippets today more than ever, making it difficult to control your marketing message. A study by Cyrus Shepard shows Google rewrites 61% of title tags. I rarely hear anyone bring this issue up in a discussion about branding. Anywhere from 10-90% of visitors, depending on your organic presence, first encounter your store in search. This gives an enormous opportunity to influence first impressions of your brand.

Furthermore, an unoptimized title and meta description decreases SEO and gets a single-digit click-through rate. Good title tags and meta descriptions have been core to better organic rankings possibly forever in SEO. When you also write good copy that appeals to people, you get more clicks right away from the same search volume.

This guide teaches you how to do write for Google and people so you get better rankings and click-through rates. You’ll learn how to research keywords with customers in mind, edit the theme file in Shopify for SEO, and write titles and meta descriptions that open the floodgates from organic search.

Control Your Snippets

In order to write and edit perfect meta descriptions and titles, you need to first understand how the two SEO tags work. A “snippet” in search results describes the content of a page:

Snippets are created from content on the page. Google has designed snippets to highlight parts of a page that relates to a user’s search query. In order to do this, a snippet can vary with different searches for a single page.

There are three ways you can shape the snippet:

1. Structured data. Also known as schema or markup, structured data defines the content of a page. For example, a review can be marked up so Google knows it’s a review. Our SEO manager Emily wrote for Search Engine Journal about the structured data to include on your store.
2. Content of the page. This includes product descriptions, FAQs, collections content, articles, and any text on the page. The h1 tag is one of the biggest influencers.
3. Titles and meta descriptions. This is what the guide is about.

You can most easily influence what gets displayed in search results with HTML code on the website that looks like:




Get these right on the important pages of your Shopify store and you will profit.

If you fail to write great titles and descriptions or even ignore this guide, Google is likely to pick the text to display. This sucks because people can write copy better than AI. This is not to say if you write great titles and descriptions that Google will not sometimes change them—what I’m saying is if you fail to, Google is more likely than not create titles and meta descriptions for you.

Keyword Research: It All Begins with Search Query Analysis

You start with a search query analysis because it determines what search queries you want to rank for. The analysis determines what you write, who ends up being your competitors, and the SEO of everything else that you do.

The best place to begin search query analysis, or what you might think of as “keyword research”, is not a keyword tool. Look at the page you are optimising then ask yourself:

If someone was to discover only this page on the Internet then walk away happy, what would they look for?

Write down all answers. You should have multiple answers for one page.

• An online store called “Jill’s Fashion Store” answers the searches “jills fashion store”, “online fashion store”, or possibly “women’s fashion store”.
• A collection page of leather jackets could answer the searches “leather jackets”, “motorcycle leather jackets”, or “leather jackets for men”. For “motorcycle leather jackets” to apply, every product in the collection should be motorcycle-focused otherwise the shoppers may leave frustrated.
• A product page selling the Vintage Digital Gold Databank watch made by Casio could answer, “vintage digital gold databank”, “gold casio watch”, or “vintage digital watch”. The “casio watch” search is not answered by the product page because the page is too specific. Someone searching “casio watch” is unsure of what they want and should receive a page from another website with a list of casio watches and information about the brand.

You want to solve a searcher’s problem better than other websites. Fail to do this and SEO becomes hard. Google’s algorithms can—or will—detect that a competitor answers the search query better than your website and so it should outrank you. Keyword research should leave you stimulated with a host of ideas to improve a page to better serve visitors.

Once you have a list of keywords to optimise the page for, type them in the Google Keyword Planner tool, selecting your target countries. You will get an estimate of search volume, competition in Google Ads, and insights into seasonal fluctation.

There are almost 10,000 searches alone for “gold casio watch”. That’s a lot.

I recommend you narrow the query to lessen competition by seeing other keyword suggestions. To filter through the thousand keyword ideas, I change the keyword view to group view. I see there’s a “Casio Gold Men Watch” group containing the keyword “casio gold watch mens” that aligns with the product:

The competition column contain “Low”, “Medium”, and “High” values is just for Google Ads. There’s no right competition level to consider when using this information for SEO.

High competition means there’s a lot of advertisers, relative to other keywords, who spend money on the keyword. When there are a lot of advertisers for a keyword, that is a good hint they are making profit. An advertiser will pay more for a keyword because it makes financial sense for their business. On the other hand, low competition means less advertisers compete for user attention, which distributes more clicks to organic search results.

A keyword research strategy to judge SEO competition is to search your potential term in Google. Look at the organic results, not the ad results or other snippets like images.

Do you see “casio”, “watch”, “gold”, or “mens” in the titles and descriptions of these pages? Hardly. That’s one indication of low competition.

We also want to have competition with poor backlinks since it is easiest to rank for such keywords. One of the listing is Asos who has a large link profile to the whole domain. I know the brand and link profiles of such large brands off the top of head, but you can use the Ahrefs SEO Toolbar to review backlink metrics. It’s awesome to not see the official casio.com store ranking high since it is the official brand, which is difficult to compete against.

A second strategy to incorporate in your keyword research that judges competition is to do a keyword difficulty analysis using Ahrefs.com. A low number of backlinks to the page, or homepage of these top ranking websites, means low difficulty and low competition. Our keyword gets a difficulty of “0”, which means ahrefs estimates you’ll need very few or no backlinks to rank in the top 10 for this keyword.

You want to balance search volume and competition. In a perfect world you optimize for high search volume (1000+ searches per month) and low competition, but there too many websites today who’ve done some SEO for that to be true. So my blanket rule is to go for keywords with some search volume and moderate to low competition.

Now you know what to go after, let’s optimize your titles and meta descriptions.

How to Edit Your Shopify Title Tags and Meta Descriptions

First you need to check if your theme is compatible with the built-in SEO features of Shopify on the homepage, collection pages, product pages, and general pages. You want all these pages to be SEO-optimised to maximise search visibility. Each presents a chance to capture organic traffic.

For the homepage, go to:

1. Online Store > Preferences
2. Enter a homepage title and meta description
3. View the source code of the page to see if each updated exactly how you want. If it didn’t, you need to edit the template

For general pages, go to:

1. Online Store > Pages
2. Select a page
3. Enter a page title and meta description
4. View the source code of the page to see if each updated exactly how you want. If it didn’t, you need to edit the template

For all products, go to

1. Products
2. Select a product
3. Click on “Edit website SEO” seen at the bottom of the below screenshot:

4. Enter a page title and meta description
5. View the source code of the product page to see if each updated exactly how you want. If it didn’t, you need to edit the template

For collections, go to:

1. Products > Collections
2. Select a collection
3. Click on “Edit website SEO”
4. Enter a page title and meta description
5. View the source code of the collections page to see if each updated exactly how you want. If it didn’t, you need to edit the template

If your updates appear on the homepage, pages, collections, and products you’re fortunate to have a Shopify theme built with the option to customise these SEO factors. Jump to the next section on how to write a SEO-friendly title.

How to Edit the Title Tags in your Shopify Template

If the SEO text is not displaying how you want as per the previous section, you need to edit the template. Warning: do not edit your store’s template unless you know HTML and can easily undo your changes. Otherwise spend a few dollars on hiring a freelancer from UpWork and spend your time doing other valuable tasks. To make the edit:

1. In the admin section, go to Online Store > Themes
2. Click “Actions” on your live them then select “Edit Code”:

3. Click on the “theme.liquid” file on the left side. This is where you can edit the Shopify theme’s title tags and meta descriptions.
4. Find the text between then replace it with:




I recommend all Shopify designers use this in their templates because it allows you to control exactly how the title tags display on all pages in the store and provides fall back. When no title tag is entered:

• The homepage uses the store’s name
• A general page uses the name of the page then dash and store name
• A product page uses the name of the product then dash and store name
• A collections page uses the name of the collection then dash and store name

The configuration also:

• Supports naming best practices for pagination
• Works with tags if your template uses filters
• Does not add a dash and store name at the end of the homepage title tag if the store name is included somewhere

The store name is good to have for ecommerce in all pages when you have a strong brand presence. If you are a small store and do not have many people search your brand, begin with excluding the store name from your title tag—the store name takes up character space to dilute keyword value. Use this instead:

Google may auto-insert the website’s name into the title. Test it for you store. It is one strategic reason to have a short name unlike “Independent Living Centres”.

How to Edit the Meta Description Tag in Your Shopify Theme

This is a lot easier to get right in your template and is often already setup.

1. Go to your theme.liquid template
2. Find the line that begins with then replace it with the following. This customizes the meta description so that paginated collections vary in description with the page number:

{% if page_description %}
  
{% endif %}

3. In the unlikely case your theme doesn’t have a meta description, copy-and-paste the code after the closing title tag ()

Congratulations. Your Shopify store’s title tags and meta descriptions are now ready to be optimised. Let’s continue to do your on-page SEO right to boost visitors and sales.

How to Write an SEO-friendly Title

Title tags are the second most important on-page factor to help SEO. The most important is great value delivered in content, images, user-experience—stuff that makes your store fantastic.

If you ignore this process, Google picks what it thinks is best:

This page had no meta description and a poorly written title tag of:

Here’s the seven-step process for a perfect title. It should:

1. Contain your keywords from the search query analysis and keyword research you did earlier
2. Be between 50-55 characters (sometimes you can get away with 35-60 characters). Too few and you miss opportunities. Too many and the title gets cut
3. Be understandable
4. Present the answer to the person’s search query
5. Match the content on the page. This should happen when the title contains your keywords
6. Be unique to other pages on your site
7. Be attractive or interesting in some way to make people want to click. Interesting is often ticked off when other steps are done

Some perfect examples:

• Yo-Yos – Duncan & Yomega | Toys”R”Us
• Best Chef Knives – Six Recommendations | KitchenKnifeGuru
• The Tissue Box Cover Store, Over 50 styles!

Go ahead and write a few title tags for your pages. Start with your keywords. Run through the other six steps once you have a title written down. It’s better to edit than to have nothing.

Shopify provide a nice preview of your meta description and title tag when editing a product or collection. You can also use Portent’s SERP preview tool to test the display of your SEO work.

How to Write a SEO-friendly Meta Description

Google in 2009 said the meta description tag is not used in their ranking. What it does affect is user attention and click-through rate, which influences rankings.

A description is easier to write than a title. The process is the same but with more character space. Aim for 145-160 characters.

Shopify makes counting character length simple by telling you the number characters in the title and description:

You include your keywords in the meta description so the text is bold in search results and stands out. Structure the description around your keywords. Put them down first then write around it by thinking of the intent behind the search query.

To fix a brain freeze, search your targeted keywords in Google to see what other sites do. Write something different. Amateur SEOers tell you to copy the top ranking website, but this is ineffective because me-too is poor marketing and most stores do not follow the seven-step writing process to produce the perfect title and meta description.

Advanced On-page Optimisation Strategies

If you stop your on-page SEO with a one-off setup of title tags and meta descriptions, you miss making a few simple changes that can boost rankings and CTR. Google may be displaying different text to what you wrote. Let’s check:

1. Allow two weeks for Google to re-crawl your site. This is enough time for Google to pick up the changes for most stores.
2. Discover what information Google changes in their search results. Use RankTank’s meta and rich snippet testing tool. Enter your website address in the spreadsheet. The tool will compare what you have in the HTML code of all pages against the snippet for each page when displayed in search results.
3. Rewrite titles and meta descriptions for pages that get changed in ways you’re unhappy with. Work your way through the spreadsheet.

My second favorite SEO strategy for meta optimisation is to use Google Search Console to spot easy wins in SEO. You want to identify pages that have a high ranking and low CTR, or have high impressions and low ranking.

1. Allow two weeks for Google to re-crawl your site if you’ve made recent changes to the titles or meta description.
2. Log into Google Webmaster Tools then go to the “Search Analytics” section.
3. Click the “Clicks”, “Impressions”, “CTR”, and “Position” check boxes.
4. Select the “Pages” radio icon because what you are about to do needs to be evaluated on a page-by-page basis:

5. Sort the pages with the most impressions at the top by clicking the “Impressions” column. For pages with high impressions (relative to your other pages), an average position above 20, and a low CTR (
6. Bonus tip: drill down to a specific page then click the “Queries” radio box to view queries for that page. Check if those keywords are included in your SEO on that page.
7. Second bonus tip: further optimise pages that have low rankings and high impressions. How could you make the page more completely answer the search queries it ranks for?
8. Super advanced bonus tip: split-test SERP results using SERP Turkey and Amazon Mechanical Turk.

Meta Keywords Tag

The major two SEO tags and titles and meta descriptions. A third SEO tag exists: the meta keywords tag.

Here’s an example of the meta keywords tag:

I made zero mention of meta keywords in the guide because it has no affect on SEO in Google and Bing.

The one use case of meta keywords is an internal tagging system, but in Shopify this is unnecessary with tagging taxonomy native to the ecommerce platform. By implementing meta keywords, you create an unnecessary task and do keyword research for competitors who can copy your hard work into opportunities for themselves.

What To Do Next?

Continue to improve your Shopify store’s SEO by following the ultimate guide to Shopify SEO with 101+ tips.